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What’s So Funny About Whoopee Cushions?

By Melvin Felix March 30, 2012 2:30 pmMarch 30, 2012 2:30 pm

A silent video of a whoopee cushion deflating in slow motion and audio demonstration of how size affects sound.

In this week’s Makers feature Who Made That Whoopee Cushion? in the Magazine, the flatulence expert Jim Dawson — who has authored books like “Who Cut the Cheese?” “Blame It on the Dog” and, most recently, “Did Somebody Step on a Duck?” — says that the fake-flatulent noises made by the toy are funny “because they deflate people.”

Though I wouldn’t dream of questioning the authority of a self-proclaimed “fartologist,” I wanted to get to the real science of it: What is it that really makes a whoopee cushion funny?

I asked Trevor Cox, a professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford in Britain, who once held the record for making the world’s largest whoopee cushion. (It was almost two meters in diameter; the record is now held by a three-meter one.)

Professor Cox, who produced the video above, said many people propose the superiority theory: that hearing flatulence is funny because it makes us feel superior to whomever let one slip. If the noise happens because of a whoopee cushion prank, the fact that the person activating the noise has been made to look stupid by someone else reinforces our superiority.

But there might be more to this seemingly artless humor.

The sound emitted by a whoopee cushion depends on a number of factors: how heavy the sitter is, for example, and how fast they sit down, not to mention the properties of the cushion itself.

“If the amusement of a whoopee cushion sound is just about superiority, then the characteristics of the sound may not be that important, provided the sound can be correctly identified as a whoopee cushion,” Professor Cox hypothesized.

The University of SalfordTrevor Cox on his record-breaking whoopee cushion.

So in 2009, he conducted an online study in which more than 30,000 people rated how funny they found 20 different whoopee cushion sounds. They ranged from one-second bursts to seven-second, helicopter-sounding marathons.

Not surprisingly, younger people were more amused by the sounds than older respondents. And Europeans found them funnier than did Americans.

And not all whoopee cushion sounds were deemed equally amusing. Professor Cox thinks the distinction ties into the concept of “incongruity,” or subverting expectation — a common ploy in humor. Take this well-known joke:

What is brown and sticky?

A stick.

You expect a funny punch line; you get an obvious answer, made funny solely by subverting the expectation that it would be funny.

That explains why the funniest whoopee cushion sound, as ranked in the Cox study, was also one of the longest, going on for seven seconds. Long after the true fart would have ended, the funniest fart rattles on.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…